CIA-backed opposition suffers defeat in Venezuelan referendum

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/aug2004/chav-a17.shtml

By Bill Van Auken

17 August 2004

The Venezuelan people on Sunday delivered a stunning defeat to a right-
wing coalition backed by Washington, rejecting its demand for the ouster
of the country’s elected president, Hugo Chavéz.

The former military officer has employed left-nationalist rhetoric
directed against the United States and the native financial oligarchy,
together with minimal social reforms, to appeal to the mass of
impoverished workers and peasants in the oil-rich country.

With 95 percent of the votes counted in the national referendum,
Venezuela’s electoral council announced that nearly 60 percent had
voted “no” on recalling Chavéz and holding new elections. Speaking to a
crowd of tens of thousands of supporters from the balcony of the
Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Chavéz called the referendum “a
present for Bush.”

Leaders of the Venezuelan oligarchy’s political coalition, the
Coordinadora Democrática, immediately denounced the vote total as
a “gigantic fraud” and vowed they would not accept the results of the
referendum. However, international observers rejected the claims of vote
rigging, confirming Chavéz’s victory.

One of the observers, former US president Jimmy Carter, said that the
turnout was the largest he had ever seen, and that he and other observers
failed to detect “any element of fraud.” Earlier, Carter declared his
confidence that “the results of the elections will be more satisfactory
than what we had in Florida in 2000.”

The referendum marked the third defeat in as many years for the right-wing
opposition and its attempt to overthrow Chavéz. In April 2002, it carried
out a coup in collaboration with the Bush administration, briefly
imprisoning the Venezuelan president and installing a junta of military
officers and businessmen. The attempt collapsed, however, in the face of
mass resistance that erupted in the slums and working class neighborhoods
of Caracas and other areas of the country.

Subsequently, an employer-organized general strike failed to dislodge the
government, while inflicting severe damage to the country’s economy. It
was only after the failure of these extra-legal attempts to bring down the
government that the opposition opted to use a clause in the constitution
introduced under Chavéz that allows for recall referendums.

Sunday’s vote gave expression to the intense social polarization that
exists in Venezuela, where nearly 60 percent of the population lives in
poverty, while a financial elite siphons off the country’s oil wealth.
Chavéz has won substantial popular support among Venezuela’s impoverished
majority, in part by using a small portion of Venezuela’s oil revenues to
fund education, health and housing programs.

He has become an object of intense hatred within Venezuela’s oligarchy and
privileged sections of the middle class. These layers view his halting of
planned privatizations—including the privatization of the country’s
massive state oil industry—as an intolerable restriction on their
plundering of the country’s economy. They equate his limited social
reforms with communism.

In reality, the programs enacted by Chavéz are not unlike the initiatives
taken by moderate bourgeois governments in Latin America in the 1960s and
1970s. They stand out, however, because they come after decades of “neo-
liberal” policies throughout the continent that have excluded any social
reform measures.

Gaining national attention in 1992 by leading a failed military coup
against then-President Carlos Andres Pérez, Chavéz was jailed, pardoned
two years later, and then elected president for the first time in 1998. He
was swept into office thanks to the disintegration of the two corrupt
parties that had run Venezuela for the previous 40 years under a system
known as Puntofijo, in which they took turns controlling the government
and divided the spoils between them.

The results of Sunday’s referendum were determined ultimately by the
turnout of millions of voters from the poor urban neighborhoods and the
countryside. Many began lining up before dawn at schoolhouse polling
places. At some polls the lines of voters were nearly a mile long, and
voting had to be extended twice, with the last ballots being cast well
after midnight.

There was also a large turnout in the wealthy Caracas neighborhoods, where
the vast majority voted to throw out Chavéz. In the weeks before the vote,
the privately owned television channels and principal radio stations had
filled the airwaves with appeals from opposition politicians and reports
of polls predicting certain success for the presidential recall.
Supporters of the Coordinadora Democrática were assured that the majority
of “undecided” voters intended to cast “yes” ballots.

During the voting itself, officials of the National Election Council
announced the discovery of a compact disk that recorded the altered voices
of council officials and a report by a news reporter announcing a victory
for the “yes” vote. Apparently, the disk was intended for broadcast before
the polls closed.

This was only the latest scheme in the campaign of dirty tricks mounted by
the opposition, with the support of Washington. Since the Bush
administration came into office, some $4 million has been funneled to anti-
Chavéz groups via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-
governmental agency created by the US Congress in 1983 to carry out
certain political destabilization efforts previously handled covertly by
the Central Intelligence Agency.

Revelations that the NED had directly funded the referendum drive—in
violation of Venezuelan law—and drawn up plans for a “post-Chavéz”
government eroded popular support for the recall. Chavéz cast the vote as
a decision on whether Venezuela would remain “a free country, or be turned
into a colony of the United States.”

Significantly, Chavéz’s victory had a calming effect on the oil markets,
with the price of crude falling from a record high of nearly $47 a barrel.
Fears of upheavals that would disrupt supplies from the world’s fifth-
largest petroleum exporter eased with news of the “no” vote.

While Chavéz, who directed his own campaign, lashed out in speeches to his
supporters among the poor and the working class against Venezuela’s
financial elite and US meddling, he directed a very different message to
domestic and foreign business interests. He portrayed himself as the only
political figure in Venezuela capable of maintaining stability and
guaranteeing uninterrupted oil supplies.

In an interview with the Argentine newspaper Pagina 12, Venezuelan Vice
President José Vicente Rangel made this theme explicit. Rangel pointed out
that the right-wing opposition had no one to replace Chavéz and no popular
support for forming a government.

“Now I will tell you that they cannot manage this country,” he
said. “Chavéz is a dique de contención (a dam against social upheavals),
and the markets understand this. They know. The markets are much more
intelligent than the political analysts, because they never want to lose.”

Washington’s noticeably muted response to Chavéz’s victory—as well as
Carter’s rush to confirm the results—are confirmation of this assessment.
In the end, the Bush administration, with its intimate ties to the oil
industry, followed the logic of the markets. The last thing it wants to
see at this moment is a continued rise in crude oil prices, with gasoline
rising toward $3 a gallon at the pumps in the run-up to the November
election.

Given the continued debacle in Iraq and the potential threat to oil
supplies throughout the Middle East, not to mention the threatened
collapse of the Yukos oil giant in Russia, secure exports from Venezuela
are a vital strategic concern. The Latin American country currently sends
the US 1.5 million barrels a day out of the 2.6 million it produces, and
accounts for 13 percent of US petroleum imports.

There is little doubt that a defeat for Chavéz would have spelled greater
upheaval in Venezuela. As Rangel points out, the opposition lacked a
credible candidate. Moreover, the constitution calls for an election
within 30 days, a virtual impossibility. Whether Chavéz would be eligible
to run in that election would be a matter of intense dispute.

Washington’s accommodation to Chavéz’s victory, however, is merely
temporary and tactical. Planning for his overthrow continues unabated.

Despite the fulminations of his right-wing opponents, Chavéz’s policies
are hardly socialist. Land in Venezuela remains firmly under the control
of the latifundistas, with the wealthiest 3 percent owning 77 percent of
the country’s farmland, and the poorest 50 percent of peasants controlling
just 1 percent of the land. Millions of others are landless.

Foreign oil corporations operate freely in Venezuela, accounting for more
than a third of production. The Chavéz government has, moreover,
rigorously complied with the debt payment conditions laid down by the
international banks and lending agencies.

Nonetheless, to the extent that his policies conflict with the economic
model Washington is dictating to the rest of the continent, he is seen as
a threat that must be eliminated. Of particular concern are plans to
double royalties paid by foreign oil companies from 16 percent to 30
percent. Moreover, Chavéz’s anti-US rhetoric finds a growing audience in
the hemisphere, given the rising popular hatred of “free-market” economic
policies and US influence.

According to El Mundo in Spain, the CIA has already begun elaborating
plans to counter Venezuela’s influence in Latin America in the wake of the
referendum. In a front-page story, the Madrid daily reported August 9 that
William Spencer, the agency’s assistant director for southern hemisphere
affairs, was in Chile meeting with CIA country directors from Colombia,
Ecuador, Brazil and Peru to discuss plans to “neutralize” Chavéz.

The newspaper reported that the CIA was discussing an escalation of
financial and military pressure against Venezuela. The report also said
that the US State Department had prepared for the possibility that the
Chavéz government would call off the referendum on the grounds that it had
uncovered a plot to assassinate the president.

This scenario is revealing. Within the US-backed opposition, there is
increasing talk of a violent solution to Venezuela’s protracted political
crisis and calls for Chavéz’s death. Among the most open in this regard is
former Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Perez, whom Chavéz tried to
overthrow in his abortive 1992 coup, and who was subsequently impeached
for corruption.

Speaking in Miami with the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, Perez
said: “I am working to remove Chavéz. Violence will allow us to remove
him. That’s the only way we have.” He continued by declaring, “Chavéz must
die like a dog, because he deserves it.”

The former president indicated that Chavéz’s overthrow and/or
assassination would be followed by a period of dictatorship. “We can’t
just get rid of Chavéz and immediately have a democracy,” he said. “We
will need a transition period of two or three years to lay the foundations
for a state where the rule of law prevails.” A “junta,” he added, would
shut down the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and all other
institutions where supporters of Chavéz enjoy a majority.

Perez is an experienced hand at imposing the “rule of law.” He is
notorious in Venezuela for calling out the army in 1989 to crush a revolt
by the country’s poor against a draconian International Monetary Fund
austerity package. Estimates of the number shot to death in the Caracazo
run as high as 3,000. He is the authentic face of the US-
backed “democratic” opposition.

There is no doubt that the cabal of right-wingers and anti-Castro Cuban
exiles running the State Department’s Western Hemisphere bureau will
redouble efforts to bring about a successful coup in Venezuela, once
conditions are more favorable. In this, however, as in the Iraq war, there
is every indication that continuity in policy will be maintained, should
Bush’s Democratic challenger, John Kerry, win the election in November.

Kerry has issued repeated statements calling for greater “pressure” to be
exerted on the Chavéz government, accusing it of using “extra-legal
measures,” creating “a haven for narco-terrorists” and sowing “instability
in the region.” He has also called for tripling the funding for the
National Endowment for Democracy.

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